LISTEN. Feeling nostalgic for ordinary campus life, as we used to know it, I recall the way my first landlord Winterton Curtis concluded his "Damned Yankee" autobiographical notes:
...IT WAS [Mizzou] PRESIDENT LAWS who admitted publicly that he settled the competition between the various Protestant denominations for representation on his faculty, by choosing his appointees in rotation. If he needed a chemist, he chose a chemist who was a Methodist, if it was the Methodists' turn. The Baptists had their chance for a place in the . sun when the next vacancy .occurred. Since the father of George Lefevre was a Presbyterian minister, he was razzed by his friends as being a Presbyterian appointee, even though he came to the University in 1899, and the administration of President Laws was only a memory. No such accusation was ever pinned on me, although my father was a Congregational minister, since Congregationalism was a denomination unfamiliar to most Columbians.
I MIGHT HAVE included here the story of how I built the house at 210 [later re-numbered 504] Westmount Avenue into which Mrs. Curtis and I moved in December 1906, but that account is reserved for another section of my autobiographical notes.
It is a thing to make life worthwhile to have lived so long in a home that one planned and built in part with his own hands on a street freshly cut from a cornfield , to have planted the trees and watched their growth until they arch the street, and above all to have lived in a university community. I think the best life in America is to be had in university and college towns such as Columbia.
And Murfreesboro, once upon a time... and someday again, maybe?
A big thematic resonance for me, in Curtis's writing and in our course, is this idea of making a home for ourselves on this earth. Carl Sagan also said that what drew him to appreciate William James's approach to questions of spirituality was the latter's emphasis on the feeling of being at home in the universe. That was also Sagan's understanding of the spiritual promise of science, that we would--through the steady application of scientific and rationalistic methods and insights--come to feel ourselves, as a species, at home in the universe. We would come to see ourselves as embodying what John Dewey would call "the continuous human community"...
“The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it.” John Dewey, A Common Faith
A big thematic resonance for me, in Curtis's writing and in our course, is this idea of making a home for ourselves on this earth. Carl Sagan also said that what drew him to appreciate William James's approach to questions of spirituality was the latter's emphasis on the feeling of being at home in the universe. That was also Sagan's understanding of the spiritual promise of science, that we would--through the steady application of scientific and rationalistic methods and insights--come to feel ourselves, as a species, at home in the universe. We would come to see ourselves as embodying what John Dewey would call "the continuous human community"...
“The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received, that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it.” John Dewey, A Common Faith
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